Andrew Sullivan’s statement, “We are all on campus now” has become pretty famous, and it’s proven true for wokeness, DEI, and other stuff that first shows up at universities and then spreads to other institutions and people. The latest on-campus phenomenon, though it’s already appearing other places, is antisemitism. And antisemitism is how I interpret this latest bit of college news published by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe (and reprinted on his website. Jacoby’s take on the latest happening (at Columbia University, of course) is mirrored in a piece by free-expression lawyer Popehat (Ken White).
Click below to read Jacoby’s piece:
Jacoby’s piece begins with Marie-Alice Legrand, a Columbia law student “of French Caribbean descent.” I don’t think she’s Jewish, as the piece doesn’t mention that. But she grew up with Jews and with knowledge about pogroms and the Holocaust, and so when she got to Columbia she decided, in the face of campus antisemitism, to found a group to counter Jew hatred. The rest is is the story:
Legrand was shocked when the Columbia campus erupted in “blatant antisemitism and hate,” as she wrote on LinkedIn. Anti-Israel throngs publicly cheered the Hamas atrocities and marched behind banners bearing Palestinian flags and the words “By Any Means Necessary.” A tenured Columbia professor waxed ecstatic over the murders, rapes, and abductions of Israelis, which he called “astounding,” “awesome,” and “victories of the resistance.” More than 140 other faculty members signed a letter defending the barbaric assault as a legitimate “military action” against the Jewish state.
The callousness of what she was seeing scandalized Legrand. She knew students at Columbia who had lost friends or relatives in the Oct. 7 pogrom, she told me, but “there was not one ounce of sympathy or compassion extended to my Jewish and Israeli friends.” She reached out on social media. “You are not alone,” she posted. “I unequivocally support and stand with you.”
She decided to offer more than comfort. Over the next few months, Legrand assembled a group of students, Jews and non-Jews alike, to create a new campus club, Law Students Against Antisemitism. They drafted a charter laying out their objectives: to raise awareness of historical and contemporary antisemitism, to foster dialogue, and to provide support for students targeted by antisemitism.
Student groups are ubiquitous at Columbia — the university boasts that there are more than 500 clubs and organizations, at least 85 in the law school alone. Given the surge of venomous anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bigotry, especially among young Americans and in academia, the need for groups like Law Students Against Antisemitism is self-evident.
On Jan. 23, Legrand and the group’s other officers appeared before the law school student senate to request official recognition for their club. Such recognition, which is needed to reserve space on campus and be assigned a Columbia email address, is normally a routine formality. Eight other clubs requested approval last month; all eight were rubber-stamped in a few minutes.
But not Law Students Against Antisemitism.
Before the vote was held, a delegation of progressive students showed up to demand that Legrand’s group be rejected on the grounds that it would “silence pro-Palestine activists on campus and brand their political speech as antisemitic.” It would do so, they claimed, by adopting the standard definition of antisemitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA]. The accusation was ridiculous on multiple grounds. First and most obviously, no voluntary student group has the power to silence anyone, on campus or off. Second, as recent months have made plain, there has been no shortage of pro-Palestine expression on Columbia’s campus.
What is that definition? Here it is from the IHRA, which also gives some examples:
“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
The Globe story continues:
Above all, it is beyond surreal to denounce an organization opposed to antisemitism for adopting the most widely used definition of the term. The IHRA formulation has been accepted by 42 countries — including the United States — and by well over 1,000 states, provinces, cities, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations. In fact, it is the definition relied on by the federal government in its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Read the definition again. Wouldn’t you write something similar if you were trying to define hatred of blacks? And is using that definition of antisemitism likely to “silence pro-Palestinian activists”? You’d have to be insane to think that; the activists are already out there, very loud and aggressive. No, the vote of the Law School’s student senate reflects only one thing: an attempt to make Jews and their allies shut up, while approving of groups, like pro-Palestinian ones, giving them all the benefits that come with official approval. The senate vote was also anonymous, as Popehat reports.
Popehat begins his article with a criticism of those who themselves go after students for generally being censorious and “politically correct”. Popehat thinks that there is far more danger from government leaders who think “that dissent is illegitimate and un-American” (he uses the GOP and Florida in particular as examples). And he’s probably right. But you fight fires where you can. So although Popehat’s not one of those who take a dim view of “woke” students, he nevertheless decries what the Columbia law-student senate did. Click to read his site.
An excerpt:
Now, Columbia Law’s students are perfectly right to be vigilant about attempts to suppress criticism of Israel. Plenty of people of bad faith have been trying to disguise suppression of anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian thought as concern about antisemitism. Colleges have been complicit and sometimes students are the ones advocating suppression.
But Columbia Law’s Student Senate is being fuzzy-headed at best, and acting at bad faith at worst, to say that a student group shouldn’t be approved if its values and viewpoints could lead to censorship if widely accepted, or that its definition of racism is wrong. A newly formed Law Students Against Antisemitism would only be able to add one additional voice — a student voice — into the incendiary debate about Israel. Their definition of antisemitism is subject to critique, like everybody else’s. They would have no official power to enforce it, only the power to associate with each other and speak their views. Their power to argue that some criticism of Israel is antisemitic is no more powerful — and no less a legitimate part of the debate — than Students for Justice In Palestine saying that it isn’t.
I also question whether the supposed logic is sincere. Would the Columbia Law Student Senate deny recognition to, say, the Black Law Students Association, on the basis that students from that group have sometimes called for the punishment of speech they perceive as bigoted? Somehow I think not; nor should they.
So does the Columbia Law Student Senate think that it’s necessary to stop speech to save it? Possibly. It’s the sort of philosophical fatuity that students have always eructed. Realistically, though, it’s more likely that these particular students think that when they don’t agree with speech, it’s legitimate to suppress that speech by any means at their disposal, including official and quasi-official means. It’s more likely that they think they have some kind of right not to be exposed to speech they hate. They see no value in the utterance of things unless they agree with those things, and don’t share the value that they should respond to speech rather than preventing it. I feel no obligation whatsoever to respect that sentiment or the students who hold it, as I’ve made clear before. And I am perfectly capable of regarding them as censorial dipshits while recognizing that they are also mostly insignificant censorial dipshits, compared to our nation’s leaders.
The fact that Columbia Law is private, and not bound by the First Amendment, does not change this analysis. Columbia advertises itself as a haven for free expression. If Columbia law wants to be free for expression that its Student Senate agrees with, maybe it should say that on the package. The belief “there is only one correct way to view the conflict in Gaza and we will not recognize student organizations who disagree” is loathsome and un-American whether or not it violates the First Amendment.
I think the students could do better. In fact I expect it of them. I expect students at one of America’s best law schools to say “I think your definition of antisemitism is overbroad and wrong, but you get to advocate it just like other groups do.” I hope that age and experience will rub the censorial dipshittery off of them. But all of this may mark me as naive. Has the America of this century provided a good example of the value of liberty? Have these students’ local and national leaders modeled a mature and civically responsible approach to encountering speech they don’t like? Likely no.
It’s not only ridiculous to assume that Legrand’s group would silence students in pro-Palestinian groups, but even more ridiculous to reject her group because it espouses a definition of antisemitism that is accepted by the U.S. government and used as a standard to enforce Title VI violations (see page 13 of the Biden-Harris initiative to counter antisemitism). Read the definition again. Do you think a group formed to fight antisemitism should be rejected because it uses the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism? And does the precise definition even matter so long as it captures the sense of Jew hatred?
Fortunately, Ms. Legrand has guts (from the Globe):
Legrand knows only too well how tenacious antisemitism can be. She said she was “heartbroken” by the student senate vote and by the moral perversity of those who would mobilize to kill an organization like hers. But she is not giving up. She hasn’t forgotten the view from her childhood bedroom window. And she knows that in the fight against antisemitism, surrender can be fatal.
We’re all on campus now, and the antisemitism spreading among colleges will simply infect the wider population—or hearten hidden antisemites to come into the open. For now there appears to be little penalty for hating Jews.
Based on the quality of reasoning by this “Law Student Senate”, it looks like an amoeba could probably get into Columbia now. Outside of the hard sciences, which are being surrounded like Gondor in LOTR, it’s hard to see what if any real scholarship is being done at these institutions.
Higher education at the so-called elite schools now seems to be back to where it was 100 years ago, where your racial identity, wealth, connections, and ideological disposition where the main determinants of whether you got in or not.
Correct.
“Where was Gondor when the Senate fell?”
I wish her well. Sounds as if she will not be silenced. There is no “on the other hand” here.
Antisemitism -> [ Dialectic ]-> Decolonization -> [ Dialectic ] -> Liberation
The alchemical magic of the Dialectic for unimpeded, immaculate praxis.
Can you do “suppression of free speech” = “helping the oppressed”?
Also, “color blindedness” = “racism”?
[ this comment suppressed ]
[ this identity suppressed ]
Liberation achieved
[ receives social credits to drink a potable water ]
I’ve read about this in a couple of other places, but yours is the most detailed analysis. It’s hard to imagine any motivation for rejecting the group than the usual one: antisemitism. Pro-Palestinian speech is not in any danger of suppression.
Many motivations probably contribute to such misguided decisions in addition to anti-semitism of some involved. I saw recently a pro-Jewish group was reluctant to participate in a counter-demonstration because they didn’t want to appear Islamophobic. Strange times.
I had a bright young student in my office this week seeking advice on graduate/professional school. She’s interested in attending law school and combining it with her interest in journalism. Columbia has a well-regarded dual Law/J-school program. I don’t think I can recommend it under the present circumstances.
The only right thing to do, besides instating the antisemitism group, is to disband the law school senate for dereliction of duty.
Thank you Jerry for bringing this story to the blog.
I trust that Legrand can appeal beyond the vaunted, self-absorbed law school student senate to the law school dean and further up the Columbia administration food chain.
This is beyond outrageous. It is disgusting.
I have been studying the life and works of Rabbi Dr.Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the greatest theologians of the last century(or any century in my opinion). Although he was literally plucked from the clutches of the anti semitic Nazi war regime and brought to America in 1940, he spent the next 32 years of his life writing and teaching about the moral responsibility of everyone to stand up to hatred, bigotry and injustice of all stripes. He was active in the Civil Rights movement and marched alongside Dr. King; he was a founding member of the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam in 1966;he met with Pope Paul VI in 1964, regarding Vatican II and the Eucumenical Council. Among his closest friends were the great Protestant theologians, William Sloane Coffin,Jr and Reinhold Niebuhr.Thomas Merton, the renoun Catholic monk and poet called Heschel ‘the world’s greatest living theologian’.His prophetic mission was to bring love and brotherhood to all of God’s children, through the understanding that we are all just that: God’s children and part of God’s creation.
What has happened to our world?